The present invention relates to methods and systems for defining and handling user/computer interactions. In particular, the present invention relates to methods and systems unifying programming models, such as with telecommunication systems.
Computer Supported Telecommunication Applications (CSTA) is a widely adopted standard suite for global and enterprise communications. In particular, CSTA is a standard that specifies programmatic access and control of the telecommunication infrastructure. Software can be developed for a wide variety of tasks, ranging from initiating and receiving simple telephone calls to managing large scale multi-site collaborations via voice and video.
CSTA is standardized in a number of ECMA/ISO (ECMA International Rue du Rhône 114 CH-1204 Geneva, www.ecma-international.org) standards. The core operation model and the semantics of the CSTA objects, services and events are defined in ECMA-269. These CSTA features are defined in an abstract and platform independent way so that they can be adapted to various programming platforms. In addition, CSTA is accompanied with several standardized programming or protocol syntax, among them, ECMA-323 that defines the extensible markup language (XML) binding to CSTA commonly known as CSTA-XML, and ECMA-348, the Web Service Description Language (WSDL) binding. These language bindings, considered as part of the CSTA standard suite, insure maximum interoperability, making CSTA features available to computers running different operating systems through any standard transport protocols, including Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), or Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP).
Recently, CSTA has witnessed a strong adoption in the area of interactive voice services. This has been advanced in part by the publication by ECMA of TR/85, “Using ECMA-323 (CSTA XML) in a Voice Browser Environment,” December 2002. Now, software agents, equipped with speech recognition and synthesis capabilities, can be deployed in call centers to provide automated services. The advantage being that businesses are based syntax for CSTA, while ECMA-348, specifies the syntax in WSDL.
However, in view of the different programming approaches that must be used, development is sure to be slowed. In particular, a developer or a team of developers must be fluent in both a service model programming as well as object oriented programming in order to develop or integrate applications. In view that a third programming approach, procedural, such as used in markup languages like HTML (HyperText Markup Language) or XML, is used in further features such as SALT (Speech Application Language Tags, the specification of which is widely available such as at www.saltforum.org), which provides speech/speech recognition capabilities to any XML application, integration and development is further complicated. Thus, a method or system that can address one or more of these problems would be beneficial.